I heard there is is to be a third Bill & Ted movie this week so I just had to use the ‘Most Excellent’ phrase 🙂

I have been quiet for nearly a month but it is not because I am shirking. I have been busily reading rulebooks and play testing games.

I have finally finished the 7th Sea 2nd Edition Core rulebook. I started looking at this in my last post Reading Up On 7th Sea. I love this game and although I have not been able to play it yet parts of it has already sneaked its way into other games I am running, more of that later.

What I am finding frustrating is that 7th Sea has really grabbed my imagination but I have no one to run it for or for me. You all must know that I am a fan of solo rpg but this is one game that completely defeats my efforts to solo play. The demands to be creative on both sides of the screen do not fit with a single person playing both sides and all the NPCs.

I have both the original and 2nd edition of 7th Sea and I do think the new version is an improvement. I absolutely love the hero creation rules.

Over in Rolemaster land we have an unusual situation of a supposedly public beta version of the rules being available for play test but the changes to those beta rules generated by testing are a secret. There is not going to be a third play test version and no one is going to see the modified rules or should that be finalised rules before it hits the shelves.

So the problem this causes me is that we know the beta rules have problems and parts are broken but we don’t know what fix the writers have decided upon. I have a play test game running but there is no point in calling it a play test at all as I am having to house rule around things. So in effect I am not play testing at all, I am playing a home brew version. So this is where 7th Sea has ‘infected’ my gaming. There is an element of the hero creation, hero stories, that I think is brilliant. It also makes sense of the experience rules in the new version of Rolemaster. So I have now woven hero stories into my new game.

Of all the parts that make up an RPG I think character creation is probably the most important. If you don’t want to play the character you get at the end of it then there is no fun in playing the game. This is something that 7th Sea 2nd Ed. does supremely well. It is just a pity that my players cannot see past hack and slash. 7th is definitely not a game for murder hobos!

Since my GM hiatus started back in June 2017, I used the opportunity to play in as many games as possible. For a very long time I was basically the go-to GM for many of my friends, but I didn’t get to play as often as I liked. Being the GM is fun, and it’s something very dear to me, BUT sometimes you just need to stay on the other side of the GM’s screen for a while. So, what games have I been playing during these almost 12 months?

Mutant Year Zero & Gen Lab AlphaIf you’ve followed this blog for a while you know that I am a fan of post-apocalyptic settings in general and the Mutant games by Free League in particular. Mutant Year Zero is definitely one of the most exciting and immersive games I’ve played so far. Since I am playing one of the bosses in our Ark (which is a derelict aircraft carrier), the game is sometimes pretty political. My character, Washington, is an idealist, trying to build a new civilization on the ruins of the past. He strongly believes in compassion, reason, and justice. In a way he sometimes feels like an anachronism. I have to admit that Washington shares a lot with myself, aside from the fact that I don’t have the Mind Terror mutation in real life.

MY0 has all the elements I love: drama, politics, intrigue, exploration. Matthias, our GM, is also doing an awesome job running the game. He even manages what usually fails spectacular: while he’s running the game, he also plays his own player character. This is usually a recipe for disaster, but in Matthias’ case it works great.

I’ve already wrote about our Genlab Alpha game in my review of the core rules, so I will skip it here.

Shadowrun 3rd Edition
This is a game I’ve been playing for years now. And even though I think that the rules are a mess, the game itself can be a lot of fun. Planning runs, trying to get to our goals without even raising an alarm is a lot of fun, and sometimes we even managed to have some flawlessly executed heists. But usually things go terribly wrong and everything ends in a messy fight. Since we usually ignore some of the more tedious rules (like bioware stress etc.), our characters got very powerful, very quickly. While some games might break down with characters that powerful, our GM just raises the stakes a bit. Our Shadowrun campaign is over-the-top and great fun, but all good things must end eventually, so we decided our current adventure will be the last. We’re dealing with dragons and their machinations this time, which is IMHO very fitting for our last bow.

Wow. That’s a mouthful. The long name is especially funny when you realize that the rules of the roleplaying game with that name is just 4 pages long. And the last page consists mainly of the names of Patreon patrons who helped fund the project.

So what is WoD: Turbo – Breakers (I’ll call it just Breakers from here on out) all about? It’s a roleplaying game written by John Harper based on World of Dungeons also written by John Harper which was a streamlined version of the popular game Dungeon World which itself is based on both D&D and Apocalypse World. Breakers is also pretty awesome. The setting can be summed up in a few sentences: our world and a fantasy world are colliding at various places all over the world and the so-called Breakers are sent into these zones to destroy the crystal which binds the alien reality to ours and while doing so they try to find valuable artifacts and kill monsters.

Like in Dungeon World (and other games with similar mechanics) Breakers makes use of Moves, or rather in this case of one Move. Whenever you try something risky, you roll 2d6 and add the relevant attribute. Results of 6 and below are failures, 7 – 9 means, you were partially successful and 10 or higher is a success. Bam!

If you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you download Breakers right now (I did mention that it’s free, right?) and check it out. I could write countless words on how much I love the game, but since it’s just four pages long, I guess it makes more sense to just point it out to you. You should also have a look at John Harper’s other work. He has created quite a few exciting roleplaying games, some of them are also available for free.

Breakers is probably not for everyone, but I just love it because of its awesome concept, the simple rules, and its hackability (is this a word?). I am pretty sure we’ll see quite a few Breakers hacks in the future, and I already have a couple of ideas myself.

P.S.: Thanks to my friend Marcus for telling me about this game in the first place!

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